Jill Filipovic from Feministe looks forward to 2009, and the panic over the hook-up culture continues. Also, the personhood amendment lingers like a bad stench and Pat Buchanan exposes himself on TV.

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Olbermann on Prop 8

Personhood people push forward

"increase the social tension over abortion"

Oh noes! Young but legal adults are doing it!

Pat Buchanan spills the beans

 

On this edition of Reality Cast, I’ll be interviewing Jill from Feministe on looking forward after the election.  Also, the personhood amendment folks branch out, the panic over the hook-up culture continues, and someone famous admits that he’s really, really hostile to science.

I have to share a small part of Keith Olbermann’s moving special comment on the passage of Prop 8, a passage that eliminated already existing same sex marriages in California. Warning.  Grab a tissue.  His voice is shaking, he’s so upset.

• olbermann *

It gets even more moving when he gets to the part about how love is one of the few things we have to shield us from a brutal world.  Seriously, I had to grab a box of Kleenex.  

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Anti-choice nuts have a lot in common with a bad stench, and it’s not just the stink.  It’s the persistence.  And the uselessness and the annoyance factor.  The Colorado Right To Life people are a great example.  They put forth this personhood amendment in Colorado and it gets beat in the polls 3 to 1.  Normal people’s response is to pack up and go home.  But if you’re a bad stench, you continue to linger, or perhaps get even stinkier.  

That appears to be their choice.  They not only aren’t going home, but starting a new organization to get this stupid ballot initiative on ballots across the country.  They’ve already put out a video, which inclines me to think they knew that they wouldn’t win, and they don’t care.

• personhood 1 *

Actually, the people voted down a personhood amendment 3 to 1, and so-called corrupt judges had nothing to do with it.  The people rejected attempts to ban abortion, and the people upheld the right to use contraception without perverted Bible thumpers getting into their business.  The people want to be left alone.

But this isn’t about actually accomplishing anything of substance.  Bob Enyart of Colorado Right To Life admitted as much, saying, quote, "Our goal is to increase the social tension over abortion." End quote.  This is about deliberately sowing discontent, resentment, and anger for its own sake.  

But back to this video, because it’s a doozy.

• personhood 2 *

Actually, it’s clear they don’t believe that.  The only way they could believe that is if they believe that fertilized eggs are human beings, and perhaps that sperm are human beings, not that living, breathing women are human beings.  Because having the right to avoid pregnancy and terminate unintended pregnancy is part of a woman’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  

I also want to quarrel with the rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, which says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, etc." Now, obviously, they excluded women from the original document, but the course of U.S. history has meant that our laws and courts have expanded this to include women.  What’s interesting about their rewriting is they specifically exclude the language about equality that was written into the Declaration.  And of course they would, because at the end of the day, this is about making women unequal, less than, subordinate, and subject to having their bodies owned by the religious right through state enforcement.

A woman has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  These phrases are meaningless with regard to cellular life.  A fertilized egg is alive, but it doesn’t have a life in the sense meant in this phrase.  A life is understood as this thing that people with brains and bodies who live in the world have.  And certainly liberty is a meaningless phrase for an egg.  Liberate it from the womb, and it becomes dust pretty much immediately.  Pursuit of happiness? Yeah, now we’re getting silly.

And now for the blatant lying:

• personhood 3 *

The thing is that they aren’t really describing the law accurately.  They’re trying to say that women have persons with legal rights floating around in there after conception.  This has nothing to do with babies, which are created after pregnancy.  Conception actually happens before pregnancy, which means they’re trying to create a legal structure that would give rights to beings we can’t even prove exist that may or may not be floating around inside your innards right now.  Taken to its logical conclusion, these laws would mean that fertile women could be ineligible not just for hormonal contraception, but for any medical care beyond pulling a splinter.  Because you don’t have to be pregnant to have a fertilized egg in you.

Which is why it’s repulsive to have women in the video saying, "Like me".  Because no, it’s not like you.  This is about those women having their status as persons downgraded, and redefining women not as persons but receptacles for people that may or may not exist.  The graphics in the video are also lies—they show pictures of 9 month old fetuses, which already have government protection.  They’re trying to extend that protection to single-celled and hypothetical life.

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• insert interview *

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This should be fun.  I checked out the Independent Women’s Forum blog to see what they’ve been up to lately, and as usual, there’s a great deal of hand-wringing over the lack of hymenal toughnes amongst today’s college aged women.  Their resident "expert" on slutty college girls is Allison Kasic, whose credentials seem to be that she went to college, though she is most assuredly not a slut, which is why I don’t understand why she’s supposed to understand it so well.

Anyway, she was trotting out this "expertise" on sluttiness on the Steve Largent Show.

• hook up *

It’s not wrong to say that it’s an intentionally vague phrase, but this pearl-clutching about how this is some new thing that kids just came up with is a joke.  I’m 31 and my single friends still talk about hooking up.  And you know what?  What I’ve observed is that they’re not trying to protect their reputation or hide stuff from nosy people like Allison.  Mostly it’s an acknowledgement that sex or sexual contact isn’t just penis in vagina intercourse.  It can be anything from making out to oral sex to party all night craziness. It’s just a more nuanced, realistic understanding of sex.

• hook up 2 *

This sort of thing makes me sad to cover Allison Kasic, even though she’s working for an anti-feminist organization and is a professional slut-shamer. The whole idea that you just hope for a relationship, any relationship, is sad, but what’s really depressing is how much Allison promotes the idea that this kind of desperation is normal.  The whole problem with IWF is that they buy 100% into the idea that emotional health for women can be measured by how "lucky" they are to have a guy, any guy, condescend to date them. They don’t discuss the fact that it’s not always roses to have a boyfriend, and especially not if you’re desperate. 

• hook up 3 *

She’s talking about a study done on the hook up culture that tries to be unbiased, but it’s clear that Allison has a strong bias, because she classifies marriage-minded dating as good and hooking up and avoiding commitment as bad.  But it’s clear to me that younger people avoid commitment precisely because they are too young to get married, and it’s good to me that they realize that.  Now, if kids want to have more solid relationships and that’s not happening, there’s a problem there.  But honestly, I blame the myth of romance that dominates our culture and Allison’s own writing.  We  have this idea that falling in love should be forever, and so obviously kids who aren’t ready for marriage don’t want to fall in love. 

I’ll leave you with this bit of sexism.

• hook up 4 *

I don’t know why conservatives are so anti-male.  The notion that men can’t feel love or want to have a girlfriend is so rude.  I mean, it’s rude to paint women as nature’s clingy needballs who are desperate for love from anyone, but it’s almost worse to paint men as unfeeling buffoons incapable of love who need to be tricked into relationships by women who use sex as bait.

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And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. This one might be rightfully called mission drift, but it’s such an awesome example of the hostility to science that pervades the right that I think I should play it.  Lawrence O’Donnell asks Pat Buchanan on MSNBC what he thinks about scientific theory that’s as sound as the theory of gravity. 

* evolution *

I fail to see much difference between pleading with someone, "What if you were aborted?" and saying to them, "Do you think you came from monkeys?"  And honestly, if Pat Buchanan is going to be on TV all the time, he needs to be asked more questions like this so people know what kind of wingnut they’re dealing with.